The weblog of Norman Geras

April 29, 2012

What accounts for the strange, persistent cognitive dissonance about this president and his relation to military force?

The question comes towards the end of a longish column in the New York Times, and the person asking it is Peter L. Bergen. He details Obama's record in this regard. Amongst other things:

Soon after Mr. Obama took office he reframed the fight against terrorism. Liberals wanted to cast anti-terrorism efforts in terms of global law enforcement - rather than war. The president didn't choose this path and instead declared "war against Al Qaeda and its allies." In switching rhetorical gears, Mr. Obama abandoned Mr. Bush's vague and open-ended fight against terrorism in favor of a war with particular, violent jihadists.

Who was? The late Christopher Hitchens, and according to Patrick Cockburn in today's Independent. Cockburn was friends with Hitchens for more than 40 years, and wrote a warm tribute to him shortly after his death. But the two of them disagreed about military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, and noting the absence of this topic from the recent memorial event for Hitchens in New York, Cockburn thinks his support for these wars should not be avoided merely out of piety or embarrassment.

I highlight Cockburn's latest column because it doesn't happen all that often that an opponent of the war in Iraq allows there was a case for it, let alone a cogent one. In fact 'cogent' isn't necessarily Cockburn's own word, since it is used only in the headline to the piece and not the text itself. But he does say that Hitch 'was the most intelligent and eloquent defender of these interventions as a means of removing dictators or preventing massacres', before going on to spell out why he thinks he was wrong all the same. He also has a qualified 'compelling' in his concluding paragraph.

What, then, was the nature of Hitch's cogent - or intelligent or compelling - defence of the two wars. Simply this:

The central theme of Christopher's case in favour of foreign military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq was that, if these wars had not been fought, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban would still be in power. He said that to be anti-war was, in effect, to allow the continuation of tyrannical and merciless regimes. "The anti-war people have a lot of explaining to do," he would say.

And:

Christopher used to say that he had "seen Iraqis... throwing sweets and flowers at American troops during the invasion". I remember replying: "That was because they wanted to be rid of Saddam, not because they wanted to be occupied by the US."

So there was that kind of case. For Cockburn himself it didn't suffice and Hitch was therefore wrong, because regime-change interventions become ipso facto imperial ones, and people don't welcome being occupied by a foreign power. Disastrous consequences soon follow.

I won't resume the argument. Everyone must know where they stand on all this by now, and I've probably devoted as much space to the Iraq war on this blog as I have to anything else. I will just note two things. First, how welcome it is to encounter a critic of that war willing to concede that there was a case for it, and a compelling one if only apparently. Second, to point out that the core of the case in some sort still stands: without military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq the regimes that were overturned might still be there at who knows what further human cost. In Syria today, we are witnessing one type of non-interventionist scenario: the massacre continues, the maiming and the tortures - for how long more?

The real difficulty of understanding relates to opponents of intervention in such situations who are impervious to the idea of there being any case at all in favour; who believe that slaughter and the rest are just to be endured until they can be halted by those on the receiving end; and who have contempt for anyone who thinks differently.

April 28, 2012

A US Senate Intelligence Committee report, yet to be released, is expected to say that there is no evidence that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were effective in helping to track down Osama bin Laden. The finding contradicts claims to be made in a forthcoming book by Jose Rodriguez, a former chief of CIA clandestine operations, that some useful intelligence was in fact produced.

Note that whether this is true or not, the aforesaid techniques, which constitute torture, are illegal under both US domestic and international law. It is right that they should be. Torture is never morally justified.

Last weekend, in posting my desert island albums for rock, pop and country, I intimated - yes, intimated - that I might do the same for jazz. Well, here I am, to fulfil that promise. It's the same deal: this is not a top anything, it's just a dozen jazz albums I wouldn't mind having on a desert island. Not in rank order.

I'm with Hare on this. I'll give just one reason why. Preventing harm to others is a proper object of legislation, but the harm needs to be clearly specifiable. Thus, physical violence or the direct incitement to it leave no doubt about the nature of what is being prevented. But harms to dignity that are contained only in certain words, whether written or spoken, is more nebulous. How much has to be said and how bad does it need to be before it amounts to an attack on someone else's dignity? The term 'hate speech' suggests something pretty fierce. But what about the casual slur, the insult between the lines, the vague innuendo? Speech is the subtlest of instruments, and verbal indignities can be visited upon others in multiple ways, from the most brutal to the very mild. Offence can be taken for small slights as well as for hateful lies. It is not clear to me how the law is to determine the proper scope of verbal harms to dignity. In that situation the old principle of keeping the freedom to say what one believes as extensive as possible should be upheld.

Cricket lovers will know the meaning of the expression; others may or may not. You don't 'go through' or 'manoeuvre your way through' a sticky wicket. It's something you're on, as in 'batting on'. Or you might have, I suppose, to show yourself capable of surviving one. The meaning of 'sticky wicket' explained at the excellent Language Log. (Thanks: RB.)

I'd like something recorded for posterity. I have been running this blog for going on nine years. I am on both Twitter and Facebook (though until recently haven't been very active on the latter). I read newspapers online day in and day out; I've been using email since some time in the 1990s; and ever since I got a mobile phone (I don't remember when), I have loved the facility of being able to send and receive text messages. So, one way and another, I enjoy being connected. And yet, all of that notwithstanding, I still have conversations with real people in three-dimensional space: conversations as fully back and forward as ever I did in the days before I'd seen the front or back of a computer. And though I won't pretend I've never interrupted one of these to read an incoming text message or look up some point on Google, by and large I do not talk to other people with my face stuck to my iPhone. No, I divide my time. What is more, I know plenty of other people about whom I infer the same is true.

I would like this recorded for posterity in case any future being should come upon the piece here by Simon Jenkins (and endless others like it) with its claptrap about 'fear of conversation' and the bad habits of internet connectedness. Jenkins's column turns a corner towards the end, but not before it has wasted a lot of space in uselessly regretting the benighted ways of the present.

April 24, 2012

As part of a more general discussion about what he perceives to be a tendency in some quarters to inflate the current danger of anti-Semitism, Antony Lerman raises the question whether or not Günter Grass's recent poem, 'What must be said', was an instance of anti-Semitism. I shall not here address the general issue of how serious a problem anti-Semitism now is. I shall not even adjudicate the question of whether the charge of anti-Semitism against Grass's poem is a just one. I will simply point out how cavalier Lerman is in deciding for his part that the charge is unmerited.

This is how he does it - the Lerman two-step. He doesn't neglect to refer to that element in the poem which is most problematic in the context of his central question: Grass's suggestion that Israel claims the right to a first strike that could snuff out - or destroy - the Iranian people. But, then, at no point in what follows does Lerman relate this element to the issue which his piece purports to be about. He treats it merely as being the result of 'a propensity to exaggerate'. Nice one, Tone. Simply omit the thing that might give you a problem.

Note that the question is not whether Günter Grass has an anti-Semitic mind, or had an anti-Semitic motive in writing his poem. Lerman is bound to acknowledge this, since he himself proposes for a definition of anti-Semitism one taken from Brian Klug that makes no reference to intent, but focuses rather on thematic content:

At the heart of antisemitism is the negative stereotype of 'the Jew': sinister, cunning, parasitic, money-grubbing, mysteriously powerful, and so on. Antisemitism consists in projecting this figure onto individual Jews, Jewish groups and Jewish institutions.

After quoting these words of Klug's, Lerman goes on to declare, 'If we look at Israel as a "Jewish group" and search for Klug's negative stereotype of "the Jew" projected onto Israel in Grass's poem, we find no such thing.'

Oh really? Here's a thought for him to mull over: one of the tropes of recent anti-Semitism is the would-be table-turning idea that the Jews, former victims of genocide, are now perpetrators, intent on destroying the Palestinian people, keeping them in Warsaw-Ghetto-like conditions in Gaza, just like the Nazis, and so forth. Grass now alleges, lightly as can be, that the Jewish state may have genocidal ambitions against Iran as well. For this allegation there is no evidence whatever, no more than there is for the poisonous analogies with Nazi genocide in the Palestinian case; but Lerman's not going to put himself to the trouble of considering whether such a groundless slander might have a connection with contemporary forms of Jew-hatred. Maybe it doesn't. But the possibility of it requires something more persuasive than: hey, a bit of an exagg there, Günter.

One last word. Lerman concludes with this observation:

If Grass's poem is so heinous, what language and what action would ever be appropriate in response to genuine antisemitism?

Apart from the fact that that is question-begging, since Lerman hasn't even tried to meet the difficulty he needs to, let alone succeeded in doing so, it also bespeaks an assumption that anti-Semitism isn't real until it's heinous. Mild or casual anti-Semitism is something altogether else, I suppose. Except that to think so contradicts Lerman's own favoured definition.

Pauline Francis studied French at the University of Manchester and became a French teacher in London, before marrying and going to live in Africa. She later studied for an MA at University College London, majoring in Children's Literature, and became a full-time writer. Raven Queen is her first novel and won the Highland Book Award; it was followed by A World Away and Traitor's Kiss. Pauline lives in Hertfordshire and describes writing as 'the dream I never knew I had'. Here she writes about Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing.

Pauline Francis on The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

When I began to write for Young Adults, I chose a character trapped by life (Lady Jane Grey in Raven Queen) because she echoed the feelings I had as a young girl growing up in a small village on the River Trent - Mill on the Floss territory: drab, damp and grey. I was expected to go out to work as soon as possible until I married.

Now I realize that this is a rather serious note on which to begin; it wasn't all doom and gloom in my little village. It's just that it didn't suit me. But isn't that what teenagers are supposed to feel about where they live?

I wanted LIFE: preferably Paris, and anything French - perhaps not a Frenchman. They seemed so obsessed with their appearance.

Then Africa came into my colourless landscape, in the shape of my English teacher's sister, who lived in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). She visited my school. Within minutes, she opened up an unknown world to me - of intense colour and heat. I fell in love with the idea of Africa immediately, although I knew nothing of its politics.

This was the young Pauline Francis who first read The Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing's first novel, many years later when I did get away, to become a student at Manchester University.

I'd never heard of Doris Lessing. A friend lent the book to me, insisted I keep it – and I still have the same Penguin edition today. I have never looked for a newer edition or wanted a different book jacket. Mine is in full - though garish - colour, featuring waving grass in the veld beneath a vast and cloudless sky. What more could I want?

It's a short novel, 218 pages – a simply structured story (with a rather conventional opening of the murder of Mary Turner by her 'boy', i.e. her servant, Moses), set in Rhodesia at a time when white settlers were farming the land. Mary is trapped by a loveless marriage (as is her farmer husband) and by the loneliness of the African veld.

At first, I just soaked up the heat and colour of this veld. But Lessing's lyrical descriptions re-ignited my love of Africa. I was determined to go there one day. Then Mary's nightmare got under my skin. I recognized her feelings: of being trapped, of powerlessness, of hopelessness. She had escaped her unhappy childhood in a succession of 'dusty little dorps', but as soon as she felt that she ought to marry and chose to leave the city life she loved for a farmer she didn't love, my mind screamed: Don't go back to where you were unhappy. I willed her to be strong. And she was - at first, living with her husband's obsession for new money-making ventures: bees, pigs, turkeys. They all failed. Then came the store – which she was forced to run for their farm workers.

'It was the store that finished Mary... it seemed a terrible thing, an omen and a warning, that the ugly menacing store of her childhood should follow her here, even to her home.' It was the store that brought back 'the greyness and misery of her childhood'.

Mary survived for some time by living with the dream of escaping to the city. When she failed and had to be fetched back by her husband, her descent into madness was rapid and heartbreaking. 'When she got home, and she found herself back in her usual routine, with now not even day-dreams to sustain her, facing her future with a tired stoicism, she was exhausted.'

What a lesson I learned from this novel. Mary reminded me that you can be so easily trapped, just when you think you might have escaped. Having escaped my own grey childhood, I was determined never to repeat it. I did go to Africa - west, east and south - but with a husband who shared my dream; and never to the isolation of the veld, although I was happy to visit it.

Every time I read The Grass is Singing, it showed me the reality behind my dream of Africa: the treatment of the 'natives' by white settlers; the use of the word 'ni..er', which still shocks me although I often heard it used by expatriates. I cherished the book even more. It forced me to become more politically engaged, to question the apartheid regime I experienced in South Africa.

If I'm honest, I didn't fully understand Mary's powerlessness. My pity for her was always mixed with irritation and that made her character all the more complex, more irrational - and more memorable. I wanted her to be more spirited. I'd escaped my dull life. Why couldn't she? She only had to make the effort, didn't she? But I came to realize that it can be as difficult for people to escape a life they hate.

I hesitated to choose this book because it's not funny: there isn't one amusing thought or word in it (if I'm wrong, let me know) and this may have been the state of Doris Lessing's mind when she wrote it before she made her own escape to London. She brought the manuscript with her and it was published almost straight away.

The Grass is Singing has dated. More than most novels, it is of its time, and its characters will not translate easily to modern life, as, for example, Jane Austen's. So I'm sorry that it's unlikely to be widely read now.

But how could I not choose it? It was my 'rite of passage' novel - and the one that has had the greatest influence on my own writing.

So, thank you, Doris Lessing. You sent me along many paths: to Africa, to political awareness, to feminism, to personal freedom, to compassion: paths I've tried to follow ever since - and to explore in all my writing.

But you never thanked me for the orange juice! You took it from me with a curt nod of the head...

... a few years ago, after her appearance at the Hay Festival, Doris Lessing came down to breakfast in the hotel where we always stay. I was the only other person in the dining room - it was before 7.00 am. For a split second, I imagined us engaged in deep conversation about The Grass is Singing. But I didn't speak; writers deserve their privacy.

She asked me to bring her some orange juice.

Perhaps I shouldn't have worn black and white that day?

But never has a glass of orange juice been poured with such love and care.

She is, after all, the writer of the novel that is the most precious to me.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]